A Reliability Enhancing Mechanism for a Large Flash Embedded Satellite Storage System

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an embedded satellite storage architecture based on the MLC NAND flash memory chips. We focus on data reliability and enhance it by adapting the RAID5 mechanism to the flash technology. This adaptation takes into account both the application and the technology characteristics : the specific access profile determines the striping granularity and the specific flash technology determines the data placement/management policy. It results an efficient mechanism, simple to implement at the FTL (flash translation layer) level without any use of the garbage collection. Thus, improving reliability using this mechanism leads to improving performance in the particular on-board satellite storage context.